Business: The Reckoner

How fast is the U.S. economy growing?

The answer to that key question has long been a subject of controversy because most Government and private statistics do not take into account such factors as price rises, and because they are based on arbitrarily selected short periods of years. Last week the privately financed Committee for Economic Development announced a new set of charts called the Growth Reckoner, boldly designed to avoid the error possibilities inherent in most official U.S. statistics.

To avoid the illusion that the economy is growing faster than it really is when prices are rising, the C.E.D. plotted the gross...

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